"Dry Creek Theory"

The creek left first.

By midsummer

it had folded its maps,

taken the silver fish of itself

and gone underground.

Children still followed

the chalked course

through stones and lantana,

certain that water

must remember its own frame.

The magpie disagreed.

It sang from a fencepost

and nowhere else.

Years later

I found a page

inside an abandoned library book.

No title.

No signature.

Only a sentence

crossing the paper diagonally,

as though it, too,

refused to stay.

I read it once.

The words did not explain themselves.

They lifted.

Not upward.

Outward.

Like seeds choosing weather.

I looked around

for the missing author,

that familiar ghost

critics are forever searching for.

Nothing.

Only afternoon grass

leaning east.

Only the smell

of iron after rain.

Only distance

becoming more distance.

The sentence kept moving.

It entered the trees.

It entered a dog barking

two streets away.

It entered an old memory

that had not belonged to it

until that moment.

By evening

the page was blank.

Or perhaps

I no longer knew

where the writing ended.

Perhaps that is the same thing.

A poem survives

by escaping.

Not from meaning,

but from ownership.

The creek knew this.

The grass knew this.

The unnamed line

crossing the page knew this.

What leaves

is not always lost.

Sometimes departure

is the form

taken by continuation.

Tomorrow

someone else

will find water

where I found dust,

will hear a different note

inside the magpie's song,

will finish a sentence

I only happened

to begin.

Let them.

The best poems

do not remain.

They travel

from mind to mind,

wearing our voices

for a while,

then moving on.

.